The Context Of Mastodon Extinctions

The mastodon that the Manis bone point struck was among the last of its kind.

The American mastodon would be extinct within approximately two thousand years of the Manis event — part of the great end-Pleistocene extinction wave that eliminated roughly three-quarters of the large mammal genera in the Americas.

The causes of these extinctions have been debated for decades.

The two primary hypotheses — human overkill and climate change — each have substantial bodies of evidence, and neither is universally accepted as the sole explanation.

The overkill hypothesis, associated most prominently with the ecologist Paul Martin, proposes that the rapid arrival of human hunters in a landscape full of animals that had never experienced human predation led to a devastating hunting pressure that collapsed megafaunal populations across the continent within a geological instant.